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“ When I was a little girl I always dreamed of becoming a famous star, known all over the world. Maybe a beautiful singer like Whitney Houston or a graceful actress or a Victory Secret model with a perfect body.”

Alright, who of us has not dreamed at least once about being super star?! You have thousands of fans, you have your personal body guard and all the money in the world to buy everything you long for. And all you have to do for it is walking all the red carpets in the world always carrying a smile on you your face and maybe going on stage from time to time hailed by hundreds of people who adore you or playing the main role in the next Hollywood blog buster.

Sounds like the perfect life, right? But most people only see the enigmatic façade behind which stars hide their unhappiness and the difference to us “normal” people is that they are not allowed to show it because they must keep up appearances.

Where the idea came from:

This is my last blog post and in the beginning I didn’t know what to right about because in my opinion I had already discussed most possible topics related to burnout which was my initial idea in the beginning for the last four weeks.

So I asked my group members what they want me to address in my last blog post that is somehow related to burnout. and the two lovely girls Angi and Sabrina brought me to the idea that it would be quite nice to get away from managers burnout and start talking about stars and what kind of problems they have to face with burnout and if this differs from the things I have already talked about in my former blog posts. And a big thanks to Angi for having provided me with a link where I found some interesting information on that topic.

So here we go:

Are stars more at risk that others?:

At least 300,000 people in Germany suffer from a burnout. Not the weak ones, or the mid-life crisis-afflicted people burn out. Those who are the committed, high performers, for whom the sudden loss of energy is like a beat in the face are the ones who burn out. The ones from whom one would have never expected it, though it seems quite logical: Only those who burn for what they are doing can also burn out which is usual for celebrities because they love what they are doing.

And the age of those who are at risk of having a burnout drops dramatically: young celebrities such like Oliver Kahn (36), Sven Hannawald (30), Sebastian Deisler (25) and Britney Spears (23) came out to be a victim of the burnout syndrome. Even among non-celebrities, the pressure is growing enormously. According to a recent reader survey by “karriere” more than one-third suffers from an extreme workload, and one out of five fears for the job.

The pressure is everywhere:

“Young people who want to make a career are the perfect victims. They show maximum effort and the willingness to shift everything until later: normal working hours, family, leisure. “

says Angelika Kallwass, an economist and psychologist.

Here, she says that in a more general way but I think it applies also to stars and other celebrities because most of the time they are not given a chance to live a life that someone would consider as “normal”. They have to travel from one end of the world to another and usually do not get a chance to spend a lot of time with their families Stars like Britney Spears are especially affected because her career already started when she was a child.

The soap stars:

They play in the ideal world of soap operas, but many of the young soap actors, cannot bear the long days of shooting, the sudden popularity and the often excessive adoration of fans, not quite as simple as their series-ego can handle all the problems of everyday life, kidnapping, addictions and heartbreaks.

Examples of German soap stars with burnout are:

GZSZ star Nina Bott quit her role in 2005 because she couldn’t hold up against the pressure anymore

Christiane Klimt left the set of “Alles was zählt”

also soap stars such as Stephen Dürr, Valerie Niehaus or “Marienhof” veteran Michael Hunter all finished their careers due to a series of stress, exhaustion and a feeling burnout

The musicians:

The music industry is considered one of the hardest in show business. Not only top figures in record sales, also endless self-promotion and countless performances are part of the daily workload. No wonder that even in this “celebrity division” some are burnt out completely:

Examples:

Rosenstolz-Singer Peter Plate

crooner Wolfgang Petry

even very young musicians are affected. A member of the boy band US5, Chris Watrin left the band in 2008

also international super stars had to take a break to rearrange their lives like Eminem, Robbie Williams and Mariah Carey

Celebrities from all subjects:

Whether a juror or super star chef, bestselling author or political hope, life as a public figure with massive media attention that is a burden on these ever-present faces, seems to be huge. Even here in Germany, there are many prominent burnout victims who realized at some point in time that they needed a break.

runway-coach and TV juror in “Das Supertalent” Bruce Darnell admitted that he also suffered from a burnout before he started working for TV

successful author Frank Schätzing, who wrote the best- selling novel “Der Schwarm” suffered also from the burnout syndrome

prime minister of Brandenburg Matthias Platzeck

This shows that a burnout can happen to everyone and surprisingly there are many people in the show business who suffer from a burnout and here I have only listed a few of them who are mostly from Germany but this list could go on and on and on if you also consider all the international stars which I didn’t talk about

This shows once again that even stars cannot always be happy even if they pretend to be and what’s the most important all their money can’t make them healthy. That is one thing stars and celebrities have to do on their own, to press the stop button and organize life in a more healthier way what most of them have done but the latest cases of Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse show that it can also end differently.

Today, I want to discuss a concept which is very much related to the topic of burnout because in many guidebooks it seems to be the perfect way to cure people from a burnout syndrome or to even prevent it: Work-Life Balance!

When I first heard these work in my human resources class last semester, I thought this is something really great and helpful in our modern world of working where more and more women go to work and also want to have a family. But then I questioned myself if this concept of Work-Life Balance is really the perfect compensation between job, family and hobby? Continue reading →

In my last week’s blog post “Burnout Syndrome: A Disease of Modern Societies?” I introduced the topic of the burnout syndrome in general. This time, I want to focus more on what meaning burnout syndrome has for us as college students if there even is one.

I thought about this topic because especially this semester I often got the feeling that I just can’t handle my workload anymore, which was mostly due to the Business Applications class where we were supposed to fulfill several tasks each week. When I talked to my friends they almost felt the same way I did and I was really surprised how they are even able to do all that every week because some of them also work during the week or even on the weekends and on top of that they have their own apartment which means that they also have to handle all household responsibilities and cook for themselves.

Since I still live at home, I don’t have to go working and can pass most of the household work to my mom and still, I thought it was too much. So I asked my friends how they get all the work done and the answers were quite like in the graphic aside. They made restrictions on other parts of their life either that didn’t sleep as much as they would have loved to do or they didn’t do their college work properly and didn’t expect to get a good grade for it or they decided to stay at home during the weekend and didn’t meet friends to get everything done. Continue reading →

Last weekend we celebrated my mom’s birthday and many friends and family members attended this little party. Only one person, we had invited before was missing: Thorsten.

His wife Susan told us that he is in hospital because he suffers from a burnout due to his job. We were all shocked when we heard that news and especially Susan was quite upset but she had already noticed that something was wrong with her husband after their summer vacation last year. Thorsten wasn’t relaxed at all and became more and more irritable. He is the CEO of a publicly traded technology company and has been working really hard on the weekends as well as doing over-time work. After a few weeks after their vacation he was worn out, tired and exhausted. There were also dizziness and a feeling of pressure in his head, which soon degenerated to a constant pain. As his condition worsened in April, Susan searched for a burnout clinic. But Thorsten wouldn’t admit that he was sick and refused to go there and continued working until two weeks ago when he woke up in the middle of the night bathed in sweat with his pulse racing comparable to a panic attack. This was a kind of a wake-up call for Thorsten, Susan said. Continue reading →

Since I have read the case study on “The discipline of teams” by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, I know that there is a big difference between working groups and teams. What working groups do is a function of what its members do as individuals but team performance includes both individual results and collective group work products which includes mutual accountability. The most important for a team is a common commitment and a meaningful purpose for all team members to reach specific performance goals. Continue reading →

When I first read that we have an assignment on group work this week, I thought this must be pretty simple because We all have been doing group work for all my life. It starts in kindergarten when you first learn to be in a group with other children of your age and goes on in school and also un university. In every field of our daily lives we imply group work not only for educational purposes. Nobody is perfect, so we try to gather information from all different kinds of sources to come as close to perfection as possible and what group work also means is that you are dividing work between many people so that not one person is doing everything but everyone is doing part of it. That’s what I have always thought of group work, it’s a nice way to get to know other people’s opinion and to see a problem from a different angle and maybe get inspired by it and think further. Continue reading →

“Berlin Can’t Get It Up.” That was the front-page headline on last Wednesday’s edition of the Berlin-based daily “Die Tageszeitung”. And it provides a brief summary of the initial reactions of many people upon learning that the new German capital airport would not open as planned on June 3.

Airport officials and regional politicians announced the delay on last Tuesday (05-08-2012), saying that ongoing tests on the facility’s fire safety equipment would not be finished in time. A new date for the airport’s opening was not immediately set, though Berlin Mayor Klaus Wowereit suggested a target date sometime in August. “This was more than a nasty surprise,” said Matthias Platzeck, governor of the state of Brandenburg. “I am not concealing that I am livid. Such a surprise is simply unacceptable so close to the opening.”

These are hard words if you consider that not even two month ago Klaus Wowereit said that: “The airport is the most important project for the economic development and growth of the region” when he introduced the one million-euro marketing campaign “Willy Brandt begrüßt die Welt” in march this year. Continue reading →